There’s a wistful touch of George Bailey to the fatefully doomed protagonist of The Executioner (El Verdugo): José Luis is a Spanish undertaker yearning to…
By the time Chor Yuen’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan released in 1972, the image of wuxia in Hong Kong cinema had changed dramatically.…
Why does Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud continue to haunt? It follows from a distance and just when I think I’ve settled up — maybe three years…
Taking place entirely in the frigid confines of an Antarctic research lab, John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror masterpiece The Thing makes for exceptionally chilling post-pandemic…
Artist and critic Fred Camper once called Howard Hawks (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here) the “hardest to define of all the classic Hollywood auteurs,…
Stanley Kubrick seems like an odd filmmaker to claim as having underrated films. I’m not as great a fan as most cinephiles, but given the…
Saul Bass’ poster for Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962) shows the dome of the Capitol neatly dissected from the building itself, the title emerging…
Forgotten for several decades after its 1982 release, Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground was rediscovered in 2015, leading to a flurry of posthumous critical attention that…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a filmmaker with a profoundly idiosyncratic streak that belies his reputation in certain quarters as a “mere” horror director. Consequently, most of…
There isn’t much left to say about George Miller’s Mad Max films. They’ve gone from the first entry’s scrappy DIY exploitation to Fury Road’s multimillion-dollar,…
In a 2006 article for the online magazine Senses of Cinema titled “Mapping Catalonia in 1967: The Barcelona School in Global Context,” Rosalind Galt attempts…
It’s 1995, halfway through the decade and two years into the centrist liberal Elysian era of pre-blow-job Bill Clinton, a year in which Forrest Gump…
For some time, and even still, the accepted critical narrative regarding Spike Lee’s 25th Hour positioned the film as one of the significant peaks in…
The 1970s was an important decade for Clint Eastwood; in a remarkably prolific run reminiscent of the classic Hollywood studio masters, the man starred in…
One of the most paradoxically romantic scenes in any film ever can be found in Alexander Mackendrick’s second film for Ealing Studios, 1951’s The Man…
By the time of Taboo’s 1999 release, after a 13-year period of filmic silence, Nagisa Ôshima had already released what could be considered two capstone…
One of the primary games played by the motley, ever-expanding group of Hong Sang-soo lovers is that of contextualizing and recontextualizing each film within his…
Timelessness is a crucial thing of nature — where sediments erode and seas dry, nature par excellence remains unchanged, a totality to reckon with, yet…
Contrary to popular (mis)conception, great horror doesn’t often come from trying to evoke fear from viewers. The audience is a vague, nebulous concept, and trying…
Even more than most of the genuine oddities that have managed to find their way into the that motley crew known as the Canon (whatever…